We Live in the Reproductive Dystopia of “The Handmaid’s Tale”

Imagine the casting call for male actors for Hulu’s new TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”: Guard with Machine Gun #1; Guard with Machine Gun #2; Cop in Riot Gear; Hangman, Hanged Man. Of the three male characters named in the show’s first episodes, one gets shot almost immediately. The other two stay mostly offscreen. It is not clear how they spend their days. There is a war on, or so they say. There are colonies, where they will send anyone who misbehaves to work to death, or so they threaten. We see little evidence. Instead, we see women. Women in scarlet robes and white bonnets, women in kitchen smocks, women in green sheath dresses, heels clicking through domestic interiors. Their lives have contracted to the private sphere or, more precisely, to the sphere of reproduction. They have no right to make the world but must make it keep going—by shopping, cooking, cleaning, and having children. The absence of husbands and jailers underscores the point that patriarchy is not a coterie of particular men—the particular men hardly matter. Patriarchy is the logic of a system.

Atwood’s novel, published in 1985, has sold millions of copies and been translated into dozens of languages, so you may know the broad strokes of the story it tells. The time is the near future. The place is Gilead, located in what was formerly New England. It is governed by the Sons of Jacob, religious fundamentalists whose rigid new society evokes a Puritan past. (People greet one another with stilted imprecations: “Under his eye,” they say, and answer, “Blessed be the fruit.”) Unspecified ecological disasters have led most couples to become infertile, and this widespread infertility is blamed on women. Women who are still able to reproduce are rounded up to become Handmaids, enslaved breeders for Commanders whose wives are “barren.” If the Handmaids object, they can be disappeared along with Unwomen (feminists), Gender Traitors (lesbians), and other enemies of the state. Some women become Marthas, or domestic servants; some female zealots work as Aunts, breaking Handmaids into obedience at the Rachel and Leah Center. These stratifications keep Gilead’s women occupied with their own alliances and enmities; they do not rise against the men who have subjugated them.

Flashbacks hint at how this new order came to be. We learn that our narrator, Offred (Elisabeth Moss)—named after her Commander, Fred, as all Handmaids are—had a husband and daughter and was working in Boston when women began to have their rights stripped away. Their bank accounts were frozen. They were “let go” from their jobs. Offred and her family tried to flee and were apprehended. She cannot be certain what has happened to the others. In the novel, the world before Gilead resembles the America of the early nineteen-eighties. The rising religious fundamentalists hold burnings of the kinds of B.D.S.M. pornography that “radical feminists” and conservative Republicans joined forces to ban during those years. Serena Joy, Fred’s wife, recalls anti-feminists like Phyllis Schlafly, who built highly successful careers while publicly admonishing women to stay at home.

The Hulu adaptation, which premierès on Wednesday, has inserted details that place the story closer to the present day. There are references to Uber and to ISIS. In a clever bit of casting, the Handmaids themselves are some of recent television’s most recognizable and pluckiest women: Moss became a career-girl icon, as Peggy in “Mad Men,” and Samira Wiley, who plays Offred’s friend Moira, is best known as Poussey from “Orange Is the New Black.” Alexis Bledel, of “Gilmore Girls,” plays Ofglen, Offred’s shopping partner, who gradually reveals herself as a member of a shadowy resistance (and a lesbian, whose partner is hanged before her eyes when they are discovered). The familiarity of these faces makes the show’s dreamlike visuals all the more disorienting. The screenwriters use voice-overs to relay Offred’s stream-of-consciousness narration, drawing us into her mind. The costumes hypnotize with saturated reds, buzzing whites, and greens. The camera, hovering over characters’ shoulders, turns and kaleidoscopes like something out of a hallucination. The soundtrack plays covers of eighties classics like “Where Is My Mind?,” by the Pixies, heightening the sense that time has come unmoored.

Atwood began writing “The Handmaid’s Tale” shortly after the election of Ronald Reagan, and she drew inspiration from political stories of the day. “Clip, clippety, clip, out of the newspaper, I clipped things,” she told Rebecca Mead, in a recent New Yorker Profile. Atwood recounted saving articles about falling birth rates, repressive policies on contraception and abortion, as well as more mundane-seeming phenomena like the rise of plastic credit cards. Liberals have often viewed the alliance of the religious right and Republican big business that empowered Reagan as a matter of misunderstanding, or a cynical manipulation of poor and middle-class whites by wealthy élites. Yet the Reagan years made clear that traditional gender roles are not just some arbitrary cultural preference. They are a means of insuring that the necessary work that capitalist power does not want the state to pay for continues to get done. Reagan Republicans called for a restoration of “family values” while also seeking to dismantle public programs—from health care and child care to good public schools and universities—that support childbearing and child-rearing; in the absence of such policies, families, and women in particular, are left to pick up the slack. “The Handmaid’s Tale” emphasizes the dangers of religious fundamentalism and draws upon the imagery of Communist authoritarianism, alluding to under-stocked grocery stores and ubiquitous spies. But the cultural forces that Atwood was responding to included a neoliberal revolution that colluded in oppressing women.

This idea has become more, not less, relevant in the three decades since the novel was published. The TV adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale” was green-lighted well before Donald Trump seemed like a viable candidate for President, and the producers must have imagined that a story of strong women under assault would appeal to supporters of a President Hillary Clinton. Instead, now that there are men in power who speak the language of overt misogyny, and use religious concerns to justify restrictions on the lives of women, fans are invoking the story as a symbol of protest. Republicans, meanwhile, continue to take an increasingly avid interest in controlling reproductive rights. “I understand that they feel like that is their body,” the Oklahoma politician Justin Humphrey recently said, by way of explaining legislation that would require women to obtain written permission from their male partners when seeking abortions. “What I call them is, you’re a ‘host.’ ”

“The Handmaid’s Tale” ’s most chilling resonance, though, comes from its vision of a society that compels women to keep reproducing even when it’s become increasingly difficult for them to do so. In the America of 2017, as in Gilead, birth rates are falling, not because of mysterious toxins in the air but because many Americans cannot imagine being able to afford children. Instead of Handmaids, the women most likely to be capable of becoming pregnant are twentysomethings trying to pay off student loans with wages from precarious jobs. (I recently heard one young woman say that she felt “sterilized by student debt.”) Others are barren not because of an ecological disaster but because they have worked straight through their childbearing years. Meanwhile, Republicans of today, like those of the Reagan era, continue to push to further privatize the resources that might support childbearing and child-rearing. Consider the remarkable question, posed recently by the Illinois congressman John Shimkus, of why men should subsidize prenatal care.

I strong-armed my partner into watching press screeners of the show with me; when he winced at scenes of abuse and suffering, I kept promising that the feminist revolution was coming. The friendships that the first episodes are setting up among the Handmaids hint that they may forge a resistance. But Gilead’s divide-and-conquer strategies will not be easily overcome. The women who are able cling to their gendered roles as their one lifeline to power: the Aunts argue that submission is a virtue; the Wives sulk around their beautifully appointed parlors. Those who have no power, like the Handmaids used for their wombs, live with the pain that all women know in some measure: the knowledge that the one thing that gives you value in society is the very thing for which you are hated.

Moira Weigel is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a founding editor of Logic, a magazine about technology.